Beat Soundtrack #14: Jonah Raskin

In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music

Jonah Raskin is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University where, for 30 years, he taught law, literature and guerrilla marketing. A performance poet and the author of 16 books, including American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation and Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955, he lives in San Francisco and aims to keep the Beats alive and well. What was he doing on March 12th, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac? ‘I was drinking red wine, reading from Mexico City Blues and reciting, “Got up and dressed up/and went out & got laid/Then died and got buried/in a coffin in the grave,/Man—/Yet everything is perfect,/Because it is empty,/Because it is perfect/with emptiness,/Because it's not even happening.”’

What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?

I heard about the trial of ‘Howl’ in 1957. My parents subscribed to Life magazine and there was an article and some photos, too. The trial of ‘Howl’ was meant to prevent Ferlinghetti from selling the book Howl and other Poems, and prevent people from reading it. It had the opposite effect. I was one of many teenagers who were drawn to the book because it was on trial. On a Saturday, I took the train from my hometown, Huntington, Long Island, to Manhattan, New York, went to a bookstore on Sheridan Square, bought the book for 75 cents, took the train home, with the book in my back pocket and the next school day showed it to my friends.

I liked the poem ‘America’ better than ‘Howl’. I was 15 years old and ‘Howl’ was above my head. I understood lines like ‘America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’. I was a ban the bomb teenager.  Howl was not the first poem I read. Walt Whitman lived in the hills not far from where I grew up. I memorised his poem. ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ for school. It was short enough and simple enough to commit to memory and then perform it on stage in school. Also, I had read Oscar Wilde's ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ – my father recommended it when I had to write an essay about a poem for an English class in high school. It too was over my head. The idea that one would kill the thing he loves didn’t make sense to me as a teenager. But I have always remembered the poem. So I went from Whitman to Wilde to Ginsberg. Makes a certain sense.

I had no idea in 1957, 58, 59 what homosexuality was or meant, though I had an uncle who worked as a waiter in a posh NY restaurant that catered to the opera crowd and according to him homosexuals came to the restaurant. He offered no comment either for or against homosexuality. So I didn’t pass judgment.

What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?

You can’t really talk about or understand the Beats without also understanding the music they listened to. The music was the soundtrack to their lives. It got into their heads and their bodies and shaped the rhythms of their prose and poetry. Kerouac for sure went to jazz clubs to listen to music. He wrote about it. In the 1950s there was no literary scene in the way that there became a literary scene later on. There were literary events at prestigious institutions, but no bookstore signings in the 1950s when ‘Howl’ and On the Road and Naked Lunch were published.  Ginsberg’s first reading of part I of ‘Howl’ was at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, an art gallery. There was no music at that event. There was wine.

Sometimes Kerouac and Ginsberg would listen to music when they wrote, but it wasn’t always jazz. Sometimes it was Bach. There is a lot of jazz in On the Road, but when I mention this to people who have read the novel they don’t remember the parts about jazz. I myself didn’t notice them until I intentionally started to look for those parts and then saw them and they were obvious. I didn’t see the jazz references in ‘Howl’ until I went looking for them; there’s a saxophone in a big way. In ‘Kaddish’, there’s Ray Charles’ ‘downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph’.  That’s a great beginning to a great poem. Beat writers created connections to music in their books and some readers picked up on the connections and turned from On the Road, for example, to Bird.

As a writer, critic and poet have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?

To answer that question fully I would have to write extensively about my own life. I graduated from high school in June 1959 and, the September of that year, entered Columbia College in Manhattan. I went to Columbia in part because Ginsberg and Kerouac had been there. I knew that, though none of the professors would talk about the Beats. They were regarded as immoral and criminal – because of Lucien Carr’s murder of David Kammerer and Kerouac disposing of the knife and going to jail.

I knew that Kerouac played football and wrote poetry. I played football and wrote poetry. If anyone made fun of me for writing poetry I would mention Kerouac and football and poetry and that usually shut them up. I travelled  by car across the US in 1974 and wrote a novel inspired by my experience and by Kerouac’s On the Road. My two main characters are Ishmael Messenger and Kenny Love, inspired by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. The novel is titled Underground. It’s poorly written but it was published and even reviewed in the New York Times, so it gave me a taste of fame such as it was.

In the wake of Ginsberg’s death I decided to write about him; after a couple of years of research I decided in 2002-2003 to focus on ‘Howl’. That was a sound decision because the 50th anniversary of “Howl” was coming up soon. The fact that American Scream was published on the 50th anniversary of the first reading of the poem added to its appeal. When American Scream was published and I talked in bookstores, someone invariably asked, ‘Did you know Allen Ginsberg?’ The answer was ‘yes’. It still is ‘yes’. But as I would explain, I learned far more about Ginsberg by going to the library on the campus of Stanford University and reading his archives than from my personal connection to him. I do include part of a conversation I had with Ginsberg in American Scream.

Those are three major places where my life intersected with the Beats: in the late 1950s and 1960s at college,  then in the late 1970s when I wrote my road novel and then when working on my book about ‘Howl’.  I recently moved to San Francisco; I feel like the Beats are everywhere in this city, at City Lights of course, but also elsewhere. As an aside, I’d add that I did an event with City Lights to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch  – the event was at the SF Art Institute. I recently attended a literary event held in Kerouac Alley which is right behind City Lights.

Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links with the Beat Generation – and how?

In the 1950s I loved the same jazz musicians that the Beats loved, including Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, also Leadbelly and Shostakovich, one of Kerouac's favourite contemporary composers. In the 1960s and for much of the 1970s I listened almost exclusively to rock‘n’roll. I liked the same performers that everyone else liked – from the Beatles and the Stones to the Kinks, the Who and Jimi Hendrix (born the same year as me), also Ry Cooder. When Jimi and Janis died the same year that was momentous. A sobering moment.

In the 1980s I listened to a lot of rock and punk on the radio. I was living in a rural part of California. I knew about Ginsberg’s connection to the Clash and listened to them. Then, because of Burroughs, I was drawn to Patti Smith. Heard her perform once, outdoors in Austin, Texas, a free concert. Memorable. I’ve always thought of Patti as a child of the original Beats. From ’67 to ’72, I was teaching at a college where big rock bands performed – like the Beach Boys and got to meet Mike Love backstage.

I did not go to Woodstock. I saw the movie and went out and bought the kind of shirt that Hendrix wears in the movie. Put it on. Wore Hendrix until the shirt was in tatters. The only time I went to a huge rock event was when I was teaching American lit in Belgium. I heard Peter Gabriel, Chrissie Hynde, and Iggy Pop. So I guess my connections to punk go back further and deeper than I have remembered. It would be difficult for me to separate out the writers of the Beat Generation from the larger counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and from the punks. It all gets mushed together, at least in my experience.

Ginsberg used to credit the Beats for creating the environmental movement, feminism, and anti-war movement. That's giving them more credit than they deserve. Yes. The Beats did have lasting influences, but they weren’t the only ones to have lasting influences. I tend to follow Diane di Prima’s point of view – she would say that Beat was a state of mind and that it was not limited to a specific historical time period. In my book, she’s as Beat as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. Sometimes people forget that the big Beat writers went on writing after 1956-59, when their major books were first published. Now I like hearing live music, though with Covid that’s less so than previously. I did go to an outdoor concert recently when everyone covered their faces.

Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?

I’m a musical slut. I have too many favourite singers, musicians and bands to name them all, and the singer I like today might not be my favourite tomorrow. In my new novel Beat Blues, Lester Young performs at a San Francisco jazz club. Sometimes Lester played/performed spontaneously and improvised. Sometimes Kerouac and Ginsberg improvised, though not as much as might seem. They revised. One wouldn’t want to describe Kerouac and Ginsberg as followers of Lester Young. They were hip to some of the same creative processes he was hip to. They all came of age in a society that valued revision, rehearsal and a kind of formalism. They were all aiming to subvert those values and to laud improvisation and spontaneity.

It still surprises me a great deal that if and when I am going to be on stage with another writer, that person usually wants to know ahead of time what questions I am gonna ask. I value thinking on one’s feet  in the spur of the moment, so to speak. You dig? I want to hear bands I have not heard before. I want to stay open to new forms of expression. That’s a Beat attitude – openness to the new, though others have had the same or similar attitude.

I have a personal connection to one contemporary singer/ songwriter/ performer: Tom Waits. The fact that I know him creates a bond. I can hear Tom’s voice right now. He’s playing in my head. Sometimes I have had an aversion to a musician or band because he or she is promoted as the greatest ever. That was the case with Bruce Springsteen. Then, I got invited by someone who worked security for Bill Graham to hear Springsteen in person. The guy played for four hours. We got out of there at 2am. The Springsteen energy rubbed off on me. It’s in my body right now.

Note: Rock and the Beat Generation reviewed Jonah Raskin’s recent novel Beat Blues on September 27th, 2021. We also interviewed the author in ‘Blues and Beats, fact and fiction’ on August 3rd, 2021.